Inside Out (2 page)

“
Wing-ding, long gone, your mouth is stupid but you got a long dong
.”

I ignore this, even though I hate it when anybody talks about my dong.

The younger robber yells at the girl behind the counter, “Hurry up!” As she takes the money out of the cash register, she tries to move her hands faster, shoving the bills into one of the white paper bags they use for giving you maple bars and stuff.

I love maple bars.

Suddenly three cop cars screech to a stop right outside, their lights flashing: red and blue, red and blue, red and blue.

“Wahooo!”

The two kids with the guns start yelling, “Everybody up!” “Hurry up!” “Move it now!” “NOW!”

We're all up and moving so fast that we bump into each other as the robber kids shove us toward the back room—I glance back at the maple bars; I really want one bad—and I notice out the window the cops jumping out of their cars with their guns. The robber kids look freaked out—their eyes are huge and scared, the older one's face is sweaty, and the younger one's face is real red.

The older kid yells, “Hurry up!” and pushes the fat suit, who stumbles and knocks into the lady and her little girl. They bump into one of the old ladies, who almost falls. I wonder if any of us will ever meet the president of the United States. That's stupid, isn't it? I mean, why would we? I trip as the younger robber shoves me hard in my back; I bump into the skinny suit. This is like a kindergarten fire drill, only all of us are lots taller than little kindergarten kids would be—that's stupid too, isn't it? I mean, of course we're taller than kindergartners. I guess I look and act stupid a lot of the time. Lots of people say that to me, so it's probably true.

In another few seconds we're all crammed into this tiny back room of the coffee shop, the part in the back that you never see. I keep thinking how much farther away I am from getting a maple bar—Damn, I hate that!

I wish I had one of those maple bars. If I were a robber, I'd take the money AND the maple bars!

“Squish-wish, squish-wish, bet you wish you could squish a wish!”

Maybe I would if I knew what the hell that meant.

“Wasteoid!”

I know what THAT means, but lucky for me, it's not Dirtbag or Rat. I
hate
when they show up.

The kids with the guns make us all sit on the floor.

The younger kid peeks out the door at all the cops and cop cars, then turns back to the older kid and says, “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?! The cops are all over the place—they'll blow our heads off—”

The older kid interrupts, “They won't. Just relax. We got all these people in here with us. The cops don't want them to get hurt, so they won't do anything.” He pauses a second, then says to all of us, “Just sit there and shut up and you won't get hurt.”

I want to stay quiet; I want to relax. But I can't help myself. “What's your names?” I ask.

The older kid looks at me. “You don't want to know our names,” he says.

“Yes, I do,” I say back. “Otherwise I don't know what to call you.”

“Dang!” says the younger gunman. “We had to pick a place with a retard in it?!”

The older kid turns to the younger one and says, “Chill.” The older kid turns to me again and says, “You can call me Frosty and him Stormy, okay?”

“Wow,” I say, really impressed. “Neat names. Are those your real names? What're your last names? Are you brothers? Wouldn't it be cool if your last name was Day, you know, like Frosty Day and Stormy Day....”

There's a loud sound outside the building, out in front. It's more sirens from more police cars.

The older kid, Frosty, ignores the new police sounds and looks at me funny. He asks, “What's wrong with you?”

I say, “I'm not retarded.”

Stormy laughs and says, “Yeah, right.”

I say, “No, honest, I'm not. Actually, I'm pretty smart. Like ask me anything about school subjects, like math or history. Ask me the number of any president.”

I wonder if the president of the United States is here right now. That's stupid again. He's out trying to protect the free world—by the way, what's so free about the free world? I mean, everything I see costs money.

I say, “Come on, just pick any number of president between one and forty-three.”

Frosty doesn't think about it for very long. “Seventeen.” He's looking out the door again.

“Seventeen,” I say. “Andrew Johnson, seventeenth president of the United States of America. Assumed office upon the assassination, by John Wilkes Booth, of the sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln—”

Frosty interrupts me, “Okay, you're
not
a retard, but just shut up, okay? I've gotta pay attention or someone could get hurt for real.”

There're more sounds of policemen yelling things to each other and running around outside.

“Okay,” I say.

Frosty pauses for a few seconds, then says to all of us, “We don't want to have to kill you, okay? We want to try and get out of this, so do what we say, when we say it, and just shut up.”

When Frosty says the thing about killing us, the little girl sitting with her mom starts to cry. She's really a cute little girl, a lot smaller than her mom. That's another stupid thing to say, isn't it, but that's what I notice, she's little and her mom is bigger. Anyway, the little girl is cute, but I think she's real scared. I remember being scared when I was little, before I got sick. I don't get scared now. As the little girl's crying, her face is all scrunched up and her lips are quivering. Her hands are shaking too, little hands with blue fingernail polish—yep, she's scared.

Stormy looks down at the little girl and says to her, “Hey!” When she looks up at him, he says, “We're not gonna hurt you, I promise.”

The little girl smiles at him, and he smiles back at her.

While I'm sitting here shutting up, I'm thinking about not understanding things faster. I guess in a way I'm embarrassed about it, but I'm happy to still feel embarrassed—Dr. Curt says a lot of people with my kind of brain don't have feelings at all. He says that would be worse. I guess if he says so, it must be true. One thing for sure, though, I got it bad enough the way I am now, I don't need “worse.”

Stormy asks Frosty again, “How're we gonna get outa this?” His voice is shaky.

“I don't know,” says Frosty.

Stormy says, “But what about Mom? What about—”

Frosty interrupts. “Just shut up a second, okay? Just chill.”

“But …” Stormy begins, but when he looks at Frosty, he stops talking.

Suddenly there're more loud sounds of cops outside yelling. Frosty and Stormy look up at each other but don't say anything.

We're all so crowded together, but it's okay, 'cause I'm sitting next to one of the old ladies, who has on some perfume that smells really nice.

“You smell nice,” I say to her.

She tries to smile at me, but her mouth can't quite make it. She has kind of pink-purple hair and real wrinkly skin. I mean
really
wrinkly. I wonder if she's a hundred years old. Stupid again, hardly anybody's that old.

So I ask her, “How old are you?”

Stormy says to me, “Jeez,
please
—shut up!”

I forgot I wasn't supposed to talk, or maybe I thought that just counted out in the other room near the maple bars. I guess it counts here, too.

“Oops,” I say.

Frosty says, “It's okay. Just try and be quiet, all right?”

I nod.

Frosty kind of half smiles at me, but he can't get his mouth to make a smile any better than the old lady could a few seconds ago. I guess he's scared too.

There's a lot more noise outside the coffee shop. Policemen yell things to each other and their sirens blare and people holler. There's the regular traffic sounds that I always notice when I'm waiting here for my mom, but now there's police radio sounds, running footsteps, and some
beep-beep-beep
sounds, like when a truck is backing up.

“Wing-wong—wing-wong—wong-gong.”

I wonder if the feeling I'm feeling right now is fear? It's hard for me to know what feeling is “appropriate” with what's going on. I'm not appropriate sometimes. Sometimes I'm “inappropriate.”

“Wong-wong—sing-song—Wasteoid—wong-wong.”

Suddenly I hear this clicking sound.
Click, click, click
. At first I'm not sure where it's coming from, but when I look around, I see that it's Stormy's gun. Stormy is pulling the hammer on his gun, the thing you cock it with, back with his thumb, then easing it back down, over and over again. Every time he pulls it back, then eases it forward, it goes
click
.

I look at the gun for a while, then up at Stormy's face.

He's staring right at me.

I've been on the other end of a gun before. I didn't like it much then—I still don't.

Thinking about it, I realize Frosty and Stormy are probably nicknames, kind of like Wasteoid. I wish I were called Frosty or Stormy. Especially Stormy—that'd be so cool.

But most kids call me Wasteoid. A lot of kids see me as a wasteoid, you know, worthless. Heck, I sometimes feel that way about myself, too, especially when I listen to Dirtbag and Rat. They sure aren't fans of mine! But when I stay on my medicine, things are all right. When I take my medicine on time, I'm okay.

I wasn't always mixed up like this, though. I can still remember things from when I was younger. My life was great back then. I had a lot of friends. I liked music. I got good grades without even trying. My biggest problem in those days was getting my hair to look right in the mornings, that and having a pimple once in a while. It was nice....

Suddenly there's a loud, roaring sound just outside the coffee shop. It's a huge noise. Frosty, who is standing right next to the doorway that leads out into the front of the coffee shop, peeks around real quick, then turns back toward us.

“What is it?” Stormy asks.

“A fucking tank!” Frosty says, his face red and his hands shaking.

“A what?!” Stormy asks, sounding confused.

Frosty yells, “A goddamned TANK, like if we were terrorists and they needed army shit to take us out!”

Stormy hurries over and peeks out the door, then jumps back. He looks scared, but he says, “It's not really a tank. It doesn't have a big cannon thing on top.”

“Fuck!” Frosty snaps. “Okay, it's NOT a tank, but it sure as shit isn't an RV. It's an armor-plated S.W.A.T. knock-down-the-goddamned-walls machine. They'll kill us all if they drive that thing in here! Oh, man, damn it, if the cops don't kill us, they're gonna throw us in jail forever, for sure. We'll never get out of this now, not with all the shit they have out there—and we can't go to jail—we can't!”

When Frosty says the thing about all of us getting killed, one of the little old ladies sitting here on the floor makes this big snorting sound. I look over at her, and I see she's started to cry. The little girl starts to cry again too, and now the little girl's mom is crying. It's turning into a cryathon back here on the floor of the coffee shop.

Frosty and Stormy's eyes dart back and forth, looking at everybody. I think they're real nervous. I hear the cops, and their big machine roaring; Frosty and Stormy must hear this too. Even I can tell that everything is pretty tense. Tense isn't good—bad things happen when things are too tense.

I try to think of something to say to make things better. “Don't worry,” I say to Frosty and Stormy, pointing at the crybabies. “They're just scared, I bet.”

“You think?” Stormy says. He's probably being sarcastic. I know people do that, like before, pretend they're asking a question when they're not
really
asking. But sarcasm doesn't work on me 'cause I just don't get it. I've tried really hard to listen for what people call a “sarcastic tone of voice,” but I can hardly ever hear it. And I don't know how to be sarcastic myself. This time I figure I should probably answer just in case he means it.